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What is a viral? Why does the content go viral?

December 28, 2017

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Why does the content go viral? Great men and women of history have tried to answer the oldest of the questions. Today N HOST explain it.

Do you know BuzzSumo? They are a company dedicated to analyzing what is successful and what is not in social networks, based on measuring almost everything that is written on the Internet: which articles succeed in a certain topic or niche and which influences are the most recommended for a specific topic. And they do it very well.

They recently published a study on why the content goes viral analyzing more than 100 million articles, and could not pass up the opportunity to move it and solve one of the greatest enigmas of humanity: Why my content does not go viral and the idiot of the competition who has no idea yes? As so many times, science gives us the answer.

What is a viral?

With the ease of the Internet and social networks to disseminate ideas and content, the term viral is used for messages that are massively distributed through social networks and blogs and even through the mass media.

The contents that become viral are usually those that appeal to emotions. They are mostly humorous and are usually never born with the intention that they become viral.

Anonymous users create the majority of contents of this type without intending to be disseminated massively. But to share them with friends or acquaintances who, considering that it is a material that deserves to be shared, disseminate it to their once among their acquaintances, who do the same afterward, until they are shared hundreds of times and become massive.

For brands, getting one of their content to go viral is a success and one of their great objectives when they launch a campaign. However, getting content to go viral is not easy.

5 tips to make a viral campaign on YouTube

Is there the perfect campaign on YouTube? What should we do to make a campaign viral? Is the idea or concept important?

YouTube has become in a few years the most visited video platform in the world. A video of a few minutes can become just a few hours in a viral plague and go around the world. With this simple gesture, companies and brands have found another way to make their products known in a more economical, direct and fun way.

What is viral marketing?

According to its definition, viral marketing is called all those marketing and advertising techniques that get an element to spread very quickly in a short time, similar to how a virus behaves and behaves, hence its name.

In a viral marketing action, the idea is everything. It is not necessary to have a strong advertising investment, but the idea is so good in itself, that uniting it to the execution, the effect is more than perfect. Many times a viral video is promoted on its own, by word of mouth or by social networks, which help to amplify the message.

Words like originality and novelty, have to be present to attract that audience that we want to talk about our video. Keep in mind that viral video usually transcends borders, so make sure your product sells well on a global basis.

The first 1000 channels on YouTubegenerate 11,300,000,000 visits per month

Click to Tweet

The main factor in an account to succeed in a Youtube video is to create powerful content that has relevance. Make your idea unique and impact, and do not forget:

1. Create videos of short duration and high quality. It does not take more than 3 minutes to impact the client. It is important that you do it in high resolution, that it looks good even in the results where it appears in miniature.

2. Put the keywords of your video in the title and description. Search engines cannot read the content of the video, so it is essential that you make it easy with a brief and accurate description of the video, using the terms of appropriate keywords.

4. Make it easy for your readers and followers. It allows your readers to vote without problems, comment, classify and even embed the video in their sites.

5. Make video not be indifferent. A viral video has to be unique, different and something that has not been published before. The video has to evoke a reaction or emotion of some kind, either positive or negative, but it does not have to be indifferent.

Long live long content!

BuzzSumo’s Sumo-scientists have concluded that the longer content is more successful than the short one, despite mobile browsing, even though our attention is getting smaller

Perhaps it has to do with that 16 times more articles of less than 1,000 words are produced than of more than 2,000, and it is already known, differentiation is the first step to success.

Eye here may have a lot to see the in-depth articles, which make Google prioritize the long information on the short on some topics, and have not yet arrived in USA, which has evidence.

Even so, and although your posts do not have to lengthen unnecessarily. It would be great if you are going to touch a topic you propose to treat it in the greatest possible depth. You will contribute more value, you will touch more sticks, you will be able to catch more long tail traffic, and science says that Your article will be shared more. Do it for her!

That does not mean that you stop making posts of 100-word memes and crawlers. Variety is the taste, and not always worth writing long articles: sometimes the time it requires does not compensate for the benefit obtained.

Always with the images ahead

The images in the posts make the articles more shared; devastating, right?

Well, although it is quite obvious, it is always good to have the empirical confirmation that after spending half an hour writing a post an hour. And a half looking for the perfect picture (which in the end is the one you saw at 3 minutes, but you have been downloading the more than finding better images), at least the effort has served to make the content viral better. In fact, approximately twice as many are shared in Social Media as those that do not have an image.

With Social Media in mind

Social Media is the main cause of your content going viral. It is what can make your content go from a small cold to bubonic plague (to keep the viral metaphor and that).

But is your content optimized for Social Networks?

Add Facebook Open Graph: Directly related to the images, the display of thumbnails of Facebook (image, personalized text, etc.) automatically multiplies the virtualization capacity of said content.

Do you want to know more about the Open Graph? See the Facebook guide on the Open Graph to squeeze the possibilities of this format on your blog.

Add images on Twitter: Again, a discovery as surprising as it is fascinating: Twitter posts with images have more engagement.

Put feeling

We always say that content must be affectionate, but where we say, love, we could also say irrational and uncontrollable hatred: the important thing is that you put feeling and your post transmits something.

Interestingly, the three emotions that work best in the field of content virtualization are the surprise, laughter, and entertainment. That’s why our posts are always so surprisingly entertaining, that you even laugh at them sometimes.

On the other hand, the least profitable emotions to write about our sadness and anger, so try to let them write that ray of sunshine you carry, no one likes to read a bitter one.

In the end, keep in mind that people look for content that defines us, that allows us to add value to our networks and share the things that matter to us.

In the study they also discovered that some of the contents that have worked best had been the tests, those of “Discover the type of woman you are” or “How old are you going to die” that come at the end of the Cosmopolitan. It may be a bias of the American market, but I would dare to say that in Spain the phenomenon can be replicated (and that it is a niche with less competition).

Lists and infographics pattern

When we segment by type of content, the winning absolutes are the infographics and the listings.

You know, very visual content and posts like “The 475 worst places to stay locked with your mother-in-law”.

Something that in fact does surprise is that the articles of the type “How to measure better” or “What techniques do not want you to know” (that is, post that poses questions “what” and “how”) work much worse than the average.

This does not mean that we have to convert all our articles into lists and infographics, but that we order the information in a coherent way, not insubstantial text blocks. Write affordable paragraphs, catchy headlines, and use graphics resources often.

Rand Fishkin told us that use graphical resources are better than infographics, and I agree, so I am quite convinced that an article with sufficient funds and with well-structured content is shared as well as an infographics or a list.

The 10 is the magic number

According to the guide of the galactic hitchhiker, 42 is the number that hides the meaning of life, the universe and everything else. According to this study, it is 10.

Well, maybe it does not respond to so many things, but it is the number that works best when it comes to making lists. In fact, listings with 10 items were shared more than the second on the list, which was 23.

The final order of the numbers that work best to make listings would be: 10> 23> 16> 24.

Why these strange numbers? I have no idea either; the data is the data. Although they confirm to me that we live in a world in which order is an illusion and we live a step away from chaos. That and I do not understand people.

The author is important

Less on Facebook that people do not care who you are and do not respect Gods or men.

But in the other networks, the contents that have a small bio of the author are more likely to be shared.

He bets that in Facebook we share a type of entertainment content and fun, while in other networks we tend more to the professional, or at least more serious, and for this the source influences, and much.

Here it is necessary to remain with which to write in a viral nova or a similar click hole based on Facebook. It will not be essential to have a renowned author -or to have a writer to dry. However, if our content is more dangerous, or Of a professional nature. It is not only relevant that we indicate clearly who writes it and why we should pay attention to it. But also indicate the sources of the article and resources that support our conclusions.

Surround yourself with influences

Again, a news bomb: When an influencer shares articles, they share much more.

In fact that you share five influences multiplied by three the average of shares you get in Social Networks, if you share only 1, the viral still increases by 30%.

What is the use of knowing this? Well, it gives us a clue to the importance of having friends in high places and building relationships with individuals that have a greater reach than ours. It would be great if BuzzSumo gave us information to see influences by topic, but since there is not, you can pull Socialbro, which has very similar functions.

They recommend seeing how an article on the topic we want to develop has been finalized so that we try to replicate its success through the influences that put it on the road. Creating relationships with them (and other users who are not influences) is the best way to get content to go viral.

Share your content several times

We have already insisted hundreds of times that we should share our content more than once if we want it to work, but BuzzSumo gives us the reason.

We have already insisted hundreds of times that we should share our content more than once if we want it to work, but BuzzSumo gives us the reason.

We are not going to elaborate on the reasons because you have them in that post, but their conclusion is that after the low viral reach. The best way to revitalize it is to re-launch it in our channels and get third parties to share it again, including reaching people that the first article did not arrive.

A challenge, but the only secret of content marketing is the continued effort; you should already know.

Why share your content more than once?

Content has more lives than a cat: multiply it and get more traffic by republishing it on social networks. We tell you why and how to get it.

How many times do you have to republish a content in Social Networks?

The main advantage of the evergreen content is that it never goes out of fashion: republishing it in Social Networks can resuscitate it and give it a new peak of visits to an old post that has worked well.

The empirical evidence is provided by Tom Tunguz, from Redpoint, in his blog, measuring the spread of his posts regarding successive retweets. Definitely? Republican content = more visits.

Why share a content more than once in social networks

Of course, and apparently, to get more traffic to a site or blog, and it works, as we see in the previous example of Tom’s experiment.Because we are not omnipresent and the Timeline has limits and, in many cases, it is too fast and ephemeral: reach the new audience, and with it, increase the potential audience that we can achieve; and, at the same time, increase the scope of the current public.Because of an evergreen content, not being current and not subject to temporal limits, adapts correctly -and also contributes-, in (much) more than a single moment.

How to share content more than once in social networks

Varies the copy. There is not a single way to say something, not a single copy of a content, let’s try them all. It is not about publishing the link to the content in question with the same text each time, but different texts. The copy is an art that can be mastered with time and experience.

Modifies the format. Nor is there a single way to publish something: links, images with links, videos with links, came … (imagination, try and conclude). In Pinterest, for example, we can include the different models of content on different boards with a link to it in each case, etc.

Experience, experience, experience. How do we discover the formula or formulas that work best for our audience? Testing and the best way is publishing more than once the same content.

With the tweets with images vs. without them there are differences, some statistics, as pointed Buffer App after having researched and analyzed the introduction of the images on Twitter:

Image tweets get 18% more clicks.

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Image tweets get 89% more favorites

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And the most impressive data:

Image tweets get 150% more retweets

Click to Tweet

In no case is it about being spammers, or constantly publishing the same without any order, concert or anything at all. It’s about having a plan and fulfilling it, making sense and being balanced.

Keys for Your Content to Become Viral

What makes a content viral? It is clear that nobody has the secret formula, but what we can give you are some tips so that your content reaches more people.

Viral content has that name for one reason: it behaves in the same way as a viral process. In that process, there are one or several outbreaks, a probability of contagion, and an environment in which social networks facilitate that a single tweet may spread exponentially, becoming a global pandemic.

You just have to think about it; if the # IceBucketChallenge had been a disease instead of a meme, it would have killed a good part of the world’s population.

If we see our content as a virus, our goal would be to sweep the humans of the planet, our video, post or infographic reach the last corner of the world. How do we get our content to become viral?

Factors that make a viral content

In content virtualization we could determine three basic factors to determine the scope of our content:

Initial points: The point from which we release content. If I only retweet him, that I have five followers, it is statistically unlikely that he will receive a result. If he does, Justin Bieber will have an immediate reach of 35 million people so that it will go viral in seconds.

Medium range: Represents the number of people a user who shares a content can reach. The number of fans, followers or the corresponding metric of each channel. For example, if the content is virtualized among gurus in a sector, the average reach can be several thousand users.

Contagion Index: In this case, it would be the probability that a user who has been exposed to the content, consumes it or spreads it. They are two different metrics and calculable if we have the patience for it.

How do I apply it to my day today?

Returning to the base: do not obsess only with the content as well. It has to be; it’s evident because nobody else will share it. And although you can do content thinking that all the influencers in the world share it, in the end, it’s not a point that you have control over.

But even with an exceptional content oriented so we can hit against a wall if we start from a wrong base (an insufficient initial focus) or if the people who end up sharing the content has a very low scope.

So for your next campaign, keep in mind that the number of people with whom you initially share the content is as significant as the quality of the material or the reach of the people who share it. Always hold in mind that the user is the king and that the only way you can control is the initial exposure, so give him diffusion, not only on Twitter: StumbleUpon, Reddit, or logs, among a vast list.

In short, we think that our circle of contacts is like the oil that will make the machinery work better: In no case, it replaces the excellent content, which is essential, but once you have managed to create exceptional content, do not hesitate to throw them away.

Three examples of viral videos, how have they done it?

1. Dollar Shave Club: How to make them remember you

The case of the Dollar Shave Club brand of razor blades was a success last year with more than 9 million views. How they did it? Creating a unique, crazy and different concept, that had little to do with the real idea: “The presentation of razor blades and comment their kindness.”

It was a video that went around the world because of its way of showing that it was not about selling a dull blade, but a concept. Because it’s not needed to pay a lot for a product to be good. Regarding virality data, they swept their main competitor: Gillette.

2. Blendtec: Looking for new utilities to my product

In the form of parody and with a touch of the most original, Tom Dickson, the president of this company tests his shredders trying to shred all kinds of objects in it to show how good they are. With the campaign dubbed “Will it Blend?” Has created several videos of no more than 2 minutes long.

One of his most watched videos is the one that shows that a Blendtec can crush an iPhone in just seconds.

Both have given of themselves these videos that Tom Dickson has created his channel on YouTube where it already has almost 700,000 subscribers and a total of more than 30 million views. With the first investment of no more than $ 50 has achieved a 500% growth in sales only thanks to these helpful videos.

3. Sesame Street: Fun ways to learn

We do not only have videos for adult audiences. Children increasingly enter YouTube sooner, and taking advantage of this pull neighborhood Sesame released a catchy song with the mega-hit “Call Me Maybe” with which has achieved more than 15 million views.

Tuesdays are the best day to launch content

100 million articles are many articles to question the validity of the data, but keep in mind that if we segment by industry, by public or by country, we can obtain different results.

Our recommendation will always be the one we have always given: If you do not know which is the best day to share content in Social Networks, first measure and then do what you want, because everyone says one thing.